Somewhere in the identity-exploring murk of my early twenties, I purchased a copy of Robert Young Pelton’s The World’s Most Dangerous Places, Fourth Edition. A shocksploitative travel compendium masquerading as a global guidebook, Pelton’s series shares how to survive landmines in Afghanistan, Colombian cocaine cartels, and dengue fever in Côte d’Ivoire. None of those prescrptions was helpful or relevant to my younger self, fresh off a summer Eurorailing to Paris and Prague, where the only perils involved pickpockets and too many pints.
Roaming a world in search of danger became less exciting once I grew a bit older, settled down in New Orleans, and realized that here in the most fragile of American cities, danger would come looking for me.
This is the implied thesis of Ellen Prager’s Dangerous Earth: no place is safe. There is nowhere to hide when our home is a planet teeming with inherent threats. That home “is a dynamic, beautiful, and wondrous place,” Prager writes. “It is also fraught with powerful, unpredictable phenomena that can kill and destroy what we hold most dear.” Weather bombs, rising temperatures, and oceanic dead zones are, like COVID-19, becoming omnipresent.
Prager begins, as one would expect, with climate change, focusing on one of the more transparent, and dreadful, events in recent memory: the collapse of the West Antarctic Larson B Ice Shelf in 2002. Scientists know the ice shelf’s gradual disintegration is due to anthropogenic activities, namely the consumption of fossil fuels which, alongside the rapid deforestation of the planet, increases atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, thus warming the Earth’s surface temperatures. From there, Prager, a marine biologist by training, unspools a sequence of unknowns and what-ifs, familiar to anyone who has kept up with the exponentially expanding shelf of Anthropocene Era titles. As ice masses melt, seas will continue to rise — anywhere between two centimeters and two meters by 2100 is a reasonable guess. Extreme weather events — cyclones, snowmaggedons, wildfires — will likely increase. A third of the world’s land surfaces will become arid, desert-like, according to one study, by 2050.
Danger will greet us, no matter the location of our doorstep.
Following this template, chapters continue apace, phenomenon by perilous phenomenon, knowns and unknowns presented using the latest scientific findings and wish lists.
In the volcanoes chapter, Prager recounts the stories of Mount St. Helens (Washington State), Nevado del Ruiz (Colombia), and Mount Pinatubo (Philippines), mega-erupters that devastated neighboring communities and landscapes over the past 40 years. They join about 1,500 more active volcanoes bubbling and broiling over, under, and around the Earth’s surface. We know plenty about two of the three ways volcanoes form: plate tectonic convergence and divergence, in which our planet’s crusts collide and recoil into each other like snail-plodding bumper cars. We know much less about the third way: hotspots, magma-rich pockets deeper than Jules Verne’s imagination. One such hotspot exists under Hawaii’s Big Island, another has bestowed us with Yellowstone’s Old Faithful. Scientists say both locales will likely be spared catastrophe, but pray for the residents surrounding the Cascades.
Today, volcanologists are mapping the inner workings, or plumbing, of Mount St. Helens and other active sites — “like a volcano CAT scan,” Prager writes. Unfortunately, seismologists often must wait until after a seismic event to advance their understanding of earthquakes. In 1992, after a series of tremors in Southern California, scientists discovered that tremors can jump between neighboring faults, triggering earthquake sequences (in addition to aftershocks, which occur along a single fault). Until humankind learns to divine impending earthquakes — an unlikely scenario — seismologists must rely on guesstimate rupture models, including one that calculates a 93 percent probability that a 7.0 magnitude-plus quake will strike California by 2045.
If the volcanoes and earthquakes don’t get you, a hurricane surely will. Or a superstorm. Or a tornado. Reading Dangerous Earth may feel much like being upheaved from your reading chair, borne by the winds of any of those meteorological cataclysms: circling, circling, forever circling, while not knowing when or how you might touch down, nor in what bodily condition.
The force of Dangerous Earth loses some momentum in a final, catch-all chapter dedicated to a melange of menacing phenomena: rogue waves, landslides, rip currents, sinkholes, and sharks. Not sharknados, mind you, those shark-filled tornados that terrorize the globe in the cult-shlock made-for-television series of the same name, but plain old, ocean-loving sharks. (What about poisonous frogs? I thought to myself, while reading these closing pages. Assassin bugs? Killer bees?)
Prager again and again makes the point that preparation not prediction is key. As we’re experiencing with the coronavirus pandemic — which epidemiologists have long forewarned was on the horizon — the direst of predictions are likely to come true. We know that volcanoes and earthquakes and hurricanes and, yes, climate crises are inevitable, so why not prepare for what lies ahead? Fund research that transforms the unknowns into knowns. Prepare communities and individuals for the worst. Stock up on essentials and don’t forget to prepare a will.
The Earth may be a dangerous place but those dangers remain manageable, until they won’t — which remains the greatest unknown of them all.
[Published by The University of Chicago Press on March 2, 2020, 230 pages, $25.00 hardcover]